She would not permit it.

From the very first phone call, she was already knitting us back together, and she did not even know she was doing it.

Chapter 8 — A Number I Hadn’t Called in Nine Years

My thumb hovered over the last digit for a moment before I pressed it.

Nine years is a long time to leave a number unused, and yet I had never deleted it, never forgotten it, never quite been able to close that door all the way, though I had told myself for most of a decade that I had.

The phone rang once.